


our fingers stretched out to the stars

by radialarch



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Not Thor: The Dark World Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 01:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9944486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: The future is full of memories and ghosts. It takes both science and myth for Steve and Bucky to start figuring out what's real.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> For aurilly, who wanted to see some of Bucky's Excellent Asgardian Adventures. This is — not that, entirely, but I hope it can satisfy some of your intra-MCU crossover fic cravings ♥
> 
> Canon-wise, this fic starts immediately post-Winter Soldier, but in an AU which ignores all of Thor: The Dark World. Thank you to idrilka for looking this over, and intervening in my tragic love affair with semicolons.

After SHIELD burned — after Steve checked himself out of the hospital, ignoring warnings about the newly generated expanse of bone in his left hip and the delicate tissue in his lungs — he took the file Natasha gave him and chased after threads that fell apart like smoke until he ran out of leads.

In New York, Tony was talking about reforming the Avengers, a contract with the government through Stark Industries. In France, Natasha was waiting out the last of the fires the old arrangement had started. He’d told Sam to go home. Steve was a loose end. He felt like a loaded gun.

The break, when it came, was from an unexpected source.

“So I’ve been working on the issue of cross-dimensional communication,” Dr. Foster said over the shaky Skype connection. “I know, it’s a little ironic.”

Steve had met Dr. Foster only once before, at a SHIELD-related function. Bruce had introduced her as a pioneer in astrophysics. She’d looked him over with a rather distant, academic eye, and drifted off into a conversation too rapid to follow soon afterwards.

In a way, she was a lot like Stark, senior and junior both. You let them talk, and mostly stayed out of the way.

“To Asgard?” Steve said. 

“I mean, once I get the general framework nailed down, it’ll be more widely applicable.” The picture froze, briefly, and resolved a second later. “— Bell didn’t want to just call downstairs, you know?” came the end of her sentence. “But I started there. Easier when you know there’s someone to talk back on the other end.”

“Dr. Foster,” Steve said, as politely as he could. “I’m not sure —”

“Oh, sorry!” she said; cut off again. “— Jane. Maybe a week ago, I picked up some kind of disturbance between here and Asgard, pretty significant, very localized. It took me a while to make sure — well, you can imagine how much harder it is to establish a signal — but I finally figured it out. It looks like someone literally just wandered up from Earth straight into Asgard.”

Steve knew, with a sudden clarity, why Natasha had insisted he take this phone call.

“— hard to get a profile because a significant portion of whatever passed through was metal. Agent Romanov said that you’d want to know?”

———

Bucky Barnes was in hell.

He had not been Bucky Barnes for a long time. He hadn’t been anything. Then he’d pulled Steve Rogers out of a river and laid him on the banks, for a reason he couldn’t put into words, and waited until he coughed up a mouthful of water to walk away.

Maybe he’d started to become someone, then.

He went to the museum, after. There were pictures on the walls bearing his face, and Steve’s face, which stirred up something faintly in the back of his head. He stayed for longer than he’d planned, circling the exhibit twice, and stole a reprint of a recruitment flier from the shop before he left.

The picture was of Captain America, wearing a steady outward gaze and a star on his chest. If he stared at it long enough, it felt almost like a memory.

(— _gonna keep the outfit_ —)

There should have been a bright line, stretching from the Bucky Barnes who didn’t die in 1945 to himself, here, now. There should have been, but there wasn’t; instead, there was only a frustrating blankness.

He searched for himself on the internet, dropped by libraries to leaf through books on the Howling Commandos while he took the trains west. It wasn’t enough. He’d had the suspicion from the beginning, that as Hydra stripped him away from his body they would have kept records, meticulously categorized the pieces of Bucky Barnes and filed them away.

He found an encrypted flash drive in a warehouse in Newark; stole a file in a mix of German and Russian in Columbus; discovered a schematic for his arm as he passed through Kansas City. But it wasn’t until he got all the way to the west coast that someone found him.

This lab wasn’t abandoned like the others. He didn’t recognize the man in the lab coat, but he clearly recognized Bucky.

The lab was full of a bluish light, and a faint hissing that tugged at the edges of his consciousness. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Bucky said, watching the way the man’s hands were shaking instead of the shadows playing out on the walls. 

He was watching the wrong thing. As the man opened his mouth to speak, the blue light flared up, blinding, and swallowed Bucky whole.

———

Dr. Foster — _Jane_ , she’d said — had a lab in London.

“Well, it’s not exactly a lab. I’m in between grants.”

“Dr. Banner said you were one of the most gifted physicists alive,” Steve said, looking around the small apartment. One wall was mostly printouts of various graphs laid over a large map. The laptop on the table was connected to a bulky instrument that Steve suspected she’d built herself.

He was, once again, reminded of Howard.

“Did he? Bruce is selling himself a little short.” Dr. Foster was starting up her computer. “Anyway, I turned down the government. That shuts a lot of doors.” She waved a hand at Steve without looking up. “One of them was SHIELD, actually. You can imagine how that might’ve turned out.”

Howard had meant well. Howard had contracted himself to the U.S. Army because the funding was generous, and because they’d given him the leeway to work on a great many interesting projects. Howard had built Steve, and he’d built the shield, and more than one gadget that had saved their lives out in the field; and, according to his Wikipedia page, after the war in Europe came to an end, he’d helped build a bomb that could level a city in the blink of an eye.

It was one of the first things Steve read after he woke up.

“Dr. Foster,” Steve said, because here was a scientist who’d moved across an ocean into a place scarcely bigger than a shoebox and funding her work with pocket change, when she could have had anything she wanted. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” she repeated after him, contemplating Steve over her shoulder. “I’m on a break.”

Steve frowned at her.

“A break,” she said again, firmly. “All these military guys after _Dr. Foster_ , wanting this generation’s equivalent of the atomic bomb. I just want to solve a problem, you know? And I can do that just as well if I’m on sabbatical, Jane Foster in a crappy apartment in a country where it rains too much. You know what they say about mathematicians and philosophers.”

Steve didn’t, but he thought he understood her a little, now.

“All right,” he said carefully, and held out a hand. “Jane. What do you need me to do?”

She blinked at him for a moment before she took it. “Eric’s still in Virginia trying to make nice with Langley, and Darcy’s helping him out,” she said. “So. You can be my assistant.”

———

Bucky hit the ground hard and rolled to his feet on blind instinct. The blue light faded fast; by the time he looked up, the last of it was dissipating into the dark.

He patted himself down quickly: his clothing, backpack, the same as they were. He was standing on — rock? This was a cave of some sort. The air smelled like rust and dirt, a faint hint of salt. Somewhere to his left, the darkness became softer with the promise of light.

If this was hell, it was not that of his childhood.

 _Wrong turn_ , came a voice. _Hel is a few realms down and to the right_.

Bucky startled, flattening himself with his back against a cave wall, and found nothing. The only sound in his ears was his own breathing.

And yet: there had been a voice.

Maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe the blue light had knocked him out, or gotten into his head somehow, and this was all some kind of illusion. Maybe he was still in the lab in Portland, dreaming, which meant they had him, which meant the chair —

He slowly bit down on the tip of his tongue, and discovered it hurt.

His surroundings stayed the same.

If he wasn’t going to wake up, he decided after a moment, there was no point in staying here, terrified. He’d be just as fucked no matter where he was, and at least out of the cave he’d be able to see. 

The cave wasn’t as cramped as the darkness made it feel. Enough room to stand up and walk, anyway. He put his left arm up, to protect his head, and started forward with his other hand pressed to the cave wall. The light seemed a long way off.

In the back of his head, someone snickered.

———

Jane offered to let Steve have her bed. Steve offered to call Pepper and work out a living situation with the London branch of Stark Industries.

In the end, they compromised. Jane kept the bed — “ _My_ back won’t hurt if I sleep on the floor,” Steve had argued — and Steve stretched himself out on the futon, surrounded by the low hum of computers and a handful of small, unblinking lights.

(“Did they have futons in the 1940s?” Jane had asked; a joke. They hadn’t, actually.)

In a way, working with Jane Foster was easy. She didn’t need a lot from him; even when she roped him into conversations, he had the feeling she was talking more to herself. She’d go off about torsion and antisymmetry and spin-spin repulsion, punctuating her sentences with hand gestures and pacing in front of the whiteboard full of equations, and only needed him to make encouraging noises once in a while.

It was surprisingly similar to navigating pop culture references he hadn’t had time to pick up, except here, there was no expectation that he should understand.

He went on supply runs, picking up aluminum foil and half a dozen lemons and “a pair of cheap walkie-talkies, seriously, get the worst one,” without asking questions. Sometimes, Jane asked him to monitor something on her computer. “Don’t worry, it’s all automated,” she’d say, like that was a reassurance. “Just hit Enter when it prompts you for the next round, and if anything starts flashing and making noises, call me.”

The problem was, this left him with a lot of time to think. It was like being on the USO tour all over again.

He took to drawing, sketches of the streets and passersby that never turned out right, though he couldn’t pinpoint what had gone wrong. On days when Jane didn’t need anything, he went running along the Thames and came back out of breath.

The memories he had of this place were seventy years old. Sometimes, in the brief moments before he blinked, it seemed he was looking at two cities at once.

There were nights when he was awake at two, three in the morning, restless inside his skin. He went on walks out in the dark, trying to shake away the feeling. It didn’t always work.

It was one of those nights, when Steve came back to the apartment with the cold still in his fingers, that he found Jane at the kitchen table, awash in the blue light of her laptop with a blanket thrown over her shoulders.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Steve asked, wincing a little at the irony.

“I had an — idea,” Jane said, “thought maybe it’d help with the stability issue. It was a decent idea, but. It didn’t.”

She said the last words very flatly, and Steve realized suddenly how much this thing was taking out of her, too.

“Did you think —” he started, “is it because —” and ended, lamely, with, “Thor.”

He didn’t know either of them very well, to tell the truth. But in New York, some time before Thor had left for home with Loki, he’d spoken a little wistfully of Jane. Something about the set of Jane’s shoulders now reminded him of it.

“No,” Jane said. “Well, yes. It’s complicated.” She shut her laptop, which left only the dim light from the street filtering in. 

His night vision was probably better than hers. He could see her twisting her hands in the blanket before she spoke again.

“I like solving problems,” she said. “And this is a good one. But maybe it wouldn’t feel so urgent, if Thor hadn’t ever been in the picture.” She paused. “Asgardians live thousands of years, you know. Time’s different for them. That’s what he said, before he left. But — it’s okay to be inspired by more than one thing, isn’t it?”

During the war, Steve remembered, they’d talked about it sometimes: the curious state of fighting for two things at the same time. For an idea, something high and unreachable; and, as the months wore on, for the people you loved, on the ground and back home.

“Yes,” Steve said. He thought about Monty, who hadn’t made it to fifty; Gabe, who’d died the year Steve came back to life. He thought about Peggy, who had built something after him and done amazing things, and who didn’t remember him the first time he went to visit, or the second.

“So that’s me,” Jane said, wry now that she’d confessed something into the night. “What’s keeping you up, Captain America?”

Steve was thinking of Bucky.

———

 _You can’t ignore me forever_ , said the voice in Bucky’s head. _This is childish_.

Bucky kept moving. He had to have been walking for hours now; he was beginning to feel thirsty. There were two sports drinks and a bottle of water in his backpack, but he was reluctant to touch them until he got a better handle on the situation.

He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know what he might need later.

It was getting lighter, though. The darkness had been lifting for a while, and the dawning gray brought with it a distant sort of roar. The salt, Bucky thought; the scent of it was stronger. The cave must be leading him to sea.

The voice, meanwhile, did not shut up.

Bucky considered two likely explanations. One was that none of this was real, and the voice was Hydra. They had him trapped, and now they were trying to trick him, or confuse him, which would make it easier for the chair to do its job. It would not have been the first time they played mind games with him, waiting for him to break.

Bucky had a notebook tucked in his backpack with a stolen flier pasted into one of the earliest pages, which meant nothing if they had him; an arm made of metal instead of flesh and bone, which they knew how to control; and the smell of the ocean in the back of his throat.

The other option, of course, was that he had finally lost his mind, and the voice was only a disturbed figment of his imagination.

 _I am not_ , the voice said, outraged. Bucky could almost picture a figure sitting up, bristling; a pair of eyebrows drawn together.

“Prove it, then.” Bucky’s voice came out hoarse, a sound that hung uneasily in the small space of the cave. “Who are you?”

 _I am Loki_ , the voice said. _Of Jotunheim_. 

An expectant pause followed. Bucky blinked, nonplussed, into the half-dark.

_Oh, for — does no one study the legends of old these days?_

“Legends,” Bucky repeated. They used to call him that, passing him down like an icon and a cautionary tale all at once. They called Steve that, too, and that’s why there was a museum with a thousand printed postcards bearing Steve’s face, and that’s why Steve had died once in 1945 and tried to again in 2014. And that’s why Bucky had followed at his heels, even though there were some things about war he knew better than Steve did, right up to the moment he’d fallen — and then, it turned out, after that, too, into a new century altogether.

“Don’t have much use for them anymore,” he said, baring his teeth in a grin he wasn’t sure Loki of Jotunheim could see, and felt the voice go momentarily silent.

———

“Hold this,” Jane said. “And, uh, stay there.”

 _This_ was some kind of gadget, about as long as his hand from the heel of his palm to the fingertips, but more fragile in his grip than Steve was comfortable with. There was an antenna extending from the top. Several of the lights on it were blinking.

Steve held it, and stayed where he was, seated in the kitchen with a half-eaten bowl of cereal.

Jane was holding something very similar in her own hands. She marched across the whole length of the apartment, which landed her next to the living room window, and fiddled with her machine until it let out a chirp.

“I think I’ve been going about this the wrong way,” she said. “A way through, right? A door and a pinhole are the same thing, topologically speaking, you don’t need to start with something fancy.”

“Are they?” Steve said cautiously. Physics, he was beginning to suspect, was driven largely by declaring different things to be the same, or the same things to be different. Maybe it made for good science, but it left Steve with a sense of unease all the same.

Elemental analysis, Jane had said when Steve was first deciding whether to come to London. It meant that there was something fundamentally different between the Bucky of his memories and the Bucky with an arm he hadn’t been born with. A difference that you could see and quantify, down to precise decimal points.

“Smooth transformations are a godsend,” Jane said. “Anyway, the point is, space-time isn’t that stable, really, you’ve got all these quantum effects going on at the Planck level. Tiny disturbances, forming and unforming before anything has time to happen. But you give one of them a kick —” she flipped a switch — “and it might get a little bigger.”

Steve could not have sworn that anything had happened. The space between them looked exactly the same; there was no sound, smell, nothing that might indicate a change had taken place. 

And yet. For a brief, fleeting moment, Steve had had the overwhelming impression of _blue_.

Jane frowned down at her hands. “Okay, maybe the resonator could use more work.”

Steve let Jane take the machine to tinker with, and finished the cereal that had gone soggy. He wondered what science would make of him — if there was a difference between himself, now, and the person who held the shield.

———

When Bucky finally reached daylight and the deafening roar of the sea, he found that the cave opened out to a sheer cliff face.

 _Oh, dear_ , Loki said, with transparently unconvincing surprise. _How fortunate you didn’t pitch directly out onto the rocks._

“What the hell’s your problem?” Bucky snarled. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” He’d walked a long time. He was very tired now and he still wasn’t sure if this was some kind of fever dream, and this Loki had a quality to his voice that set his teeth on edge.

Voice? It was directly in his head. Not even the waves drowned it out.

 _The dog of Hydra_ , said Loki slowly. _Off its leash, looking for a new master. Surely you have problems enough without inquiring about mine_.

He could _feel_ Loki prodding around in his mind like it was entertainment. He shook his head, which did nothing, and leaned out the cave entrance to look at the slick black rock beneath.

Then — a waver, in the back of his head. It disappeared as soon as Bucky noticed, but that was enough.

“You don’t,” he said triumphantly, straightening up. “Have anything better to do. You’re _bored_.”

 _I am a god,_ Loki snapped. _I can’t be bored_.

A thin thread of memory, of being locked up alone. He’d felt his mind slowly going to pieces, with nowhere to turn to but itself; it had been like being born again when they finally let him out.

A distraction, a _toy_ could mean everything, when it was all you had.

Very deliberately, Bucky began to ease himself out into the open air. Bits of rock crumbled beneath him, and tumbled downwards.

 _You won’t_ , Loki said, with the faintest hint of uncertainty. _You people are so attached to living._

Bucky’s shoulders were free now. The wind rose up around his face, and he had to shout into the howling din. “But me, pal, I’ve been dead a long time.”

The ground scraped at his knees as he pressed forward; the palm of his right hand was torn and bleeding. He was supposed to have died years ago. In a book he’d flipped through while looking for answers, he’d seen a picture of a gravestone with his name on it.

He closed his eyes.

 _STOP_. The word reverberated through his skull, set up echoes all the way down to his ribs. 

Time froze.

 _You may live_ , Loki declared, gracious like it was a mercy. Bucky had the unpleasant feeling he was being examined by a sharp, far-off eye.

He laughed, a ragged sound that didn’t go far. “What makes you think it’s your choice?”

Loki could have a voice like honey, when he wanted. _Because, Sergeant Barnes, then I shall tell you something about your captain_.

———

Joining the army had not endowed Steve with any more patience, a fact which had always annoyed Colonel Phillips immensely. “The army is ninety-nine percent waiting on your ass and one percent trying not to shit your pants,” he used to say. “What the hell did you think it was, Rogers?”

And Steve would reply, in the tone of voice that made Colonel Phillips scowl and mutter about insubordination, “Thought it meant getting something done, sir.”

The problem now was that he couldn’t do anything. Jane was chasing an idea which didn’t need him, and Asgard was still a dream to him. He couldn't fight his way into it.

Bucky had always been better at waiting; he had the easy patience that came with having three younger sisters, before the army focused it into something harder, sharper. He could almost hear Bucky now, see the faint resigned grin he put on when Steve got too restless: _Keep your hands busy, Rogers, and let the rest of us catch our breaths once in a while_.

Steve tried. He sketched the view out of the window, then the view of the streets he remembered when the future had only been a distant possibility. Then he gave up on both and drew a memory instead: Bucky, still as death with the scope of his Johnson pressed to his eye.

Laid out like this, he could see how Hydra had shaped the Winter Soldier out of the clean lines of Bucky’s body. It would have been easy, if you didn’t care about breaking the person underneath.

But Bucky had remembered him.

He went for a walk. When he came back, he looked in the cupboard for the container of coffee with a note still stuck to its side. _Save for when Jane gets that look in her eyes_ , it said.

Steve made coffee.

A few minutes later, Jane came out from the bedroom and said, “Hey.”

The coffee was still warm. Steve poured her a cup while she pulled up a chair and set her head down in her arms.

“Thanks,” she said, stirring when he put the mug into her hands. And then, “You’re not like how I thought you’d be.”

“Like in the history books,” Steve said.

“Well. Yeah. It’s silly, really.” She tipped her head toward his notebook. “So is this your guy? The one we’re looking for.”

Steve stared at the drawing, which felt now like someone else had brought it to life, a long time ago. “I — yes,” he said. “That’s Bucky.”

“They said he killed people.”

Steve didn’t laugh, but it was a close thing. “So did I,” he said, “and I had a choice.”

Jane finished her coffee, slowly. “I think I’ve worked out the problems with the resonators,” she said eventually, and got to her feet. “We can probably try again tomorrow.” 

“All right,” he said, and, because that didn’t seem enough: “Thank you.” He meant it. Jane hadn’t needed Steve to be someone else, and that made this city of ghosts — bearable.

Jane’s mouth twitched. “We’ll see.” She retreated back to her room, and paused with a hand on the door. “You know, Steve, I think I might actually like you a lot better than I ever liked Captain America.”

 _So do I_ , Steve thought wryly. He didn’t say it, but he thought maybe she understood anyway.

———

“What do you know about Steve?” Bucky said into the air.

 _Sensitive subject?_ Loki was radiating smugness. _I met him once. Seemed rather violent_.

Bucky couldn’t help barking out a laugh. “Don’t need to have met him to know that.”

For a moment, there was nothing. Bucky had the impression that Loki was thinking. Then — a great horned figure, rising above a crowd, while a man with a shield plummeted out of the sky.

Bucky blinked, and the image was gone.

“Are you making this up?” Bucky demanded. “What the hell’s Steve wearing?”

 _Of course not. I have impeccable taste. The late Mr. Coulson, less so_.

“Not if you’re the guy with the giant horns,” Bucky muttered. “What kind of god goes around looking like that?”

 _Lies_ , Loki said, and a silvery mist descended around Bucky. _Trickery_ , he said, and the world went utterly dark. _Mischief_ , he said, and the rock under Bucky’s knees crumbled into nothing.

Bucky fell, and the wind whipped his hoarse shout away.

 _Illusion_ , Loki said, and Bucky was, suddenly, somewhere else.

It was as if he were suspended in the sky. There was a great city spreading out below him, shining in the sunlight like molten gold. Bucky shook his head, but he stayed; the vision stayed.

 _Asgard_ , said Loki’s voice, with a hint of pride. _Home of the gods._

“I thought,” Bucky said, “you were from Jotunheim.”

There was a terrifying lurch before the world steadied itself. When he next felt Loki, there was a sharpness to his presence that reminded Bucky, faintly, of a cat with its claws unsheathed.

 _Humans_ , he said. _So open. So breakable._

Loki swept through Bucky’s head, and a thousand memories came alive in his wake. Getting in a fight at sixteen; dancing with a girl at twenty; learning how to breathe with a rifle in his hands so the bullet would fly true. He was swallowing down a drink for the first time, he was surrendering to a group of soldiers with weapons that glowed blue, he was trying to swing an arm that wasn’t there anymore —

He was waiting for Steve, and Steve was dead, and the only thing he knew after that was the shape of ghosts.

 _Is this your savior?_ Loki peered at a memory of Steve at twelve, in a shirt too big for him, wiping blood from his mouth. _Or this?_ Steve with a shield from the stage, a stolen helmet fastened beneath his jaw. _Ah, no. It’s this_.

Steve dropping the shield, Steve underneath his hands, the fight going out of him for the first time since Bucky had known him. And God, Bucky had known him a long time — known him like himself, once, before he’d lost them both.

“What do you want,” Bucky said, the sound thin between his teeth. “What the hell do you _want_.”

 _So this is love_ , Loki said, staring at the fragments of Steve preserved in his memories like amber. _Tell me, why have you kept it all this time? You never told him_.

The words came slowly out of his throat. “Because, you heartless fucker, it was worth it anyway.”

Loki let him go.

There was a blue glow rising all around him. _A secret for a secret, then_ , Loki said. _I’ve been inside the captain’s head. It looked rather like yours_.

“What are you going to do,” Bucky said, even as the world in front of him blurred; he thought he saw a flicker, two silhouettes, looking at him.

Loki withdrew from his head like a whisper. Bucky could hear him say, very faintly, _I think — I’d like to talk to my mother now_.

———

There was something solid underneath Bucky’s knees and the palm of his hand. Bucky pushed himself up and caught a glimpse of a face gone very pale before someone caught him by the shoulders.

It was Steve. Bucky knew the shape of his hands, now, knew the warm weight of Steve’s body pressed against his and the way Steve fit his head into the space between Bucky’s neck and shoulder.

“Bucky,” he said, between deep, shuddering breaths, and then pulled away to look at him. “Are you —”

He couldn’t say _all right_. Bucky fumbled for the most honest thing he could say. “I’ve got you.”

The end of the sentence twisted into a question, even though Bucky hadn’t meant it to; but Steve’s face, tired and worried, was beginning to crack into a smile. 

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve said. “If you want me.”

And that was a question, too. Bucky could see it now, in the soft line of Steve’s mouth and the quiver in his throat.

“Jaws of death,” Bucky mumbled, pressing forward until he could drop his head onto Steve’s shoulder and feel the solid shape of him again. “It hasn’t got us yet, has it.”


End file.
